Explosive Growth in Flash Memory Enterprise Applications

Flash memory in enterprise applications is enabling new capabilities in enterprise storage and is an enabler of cloud storage offerings. The use of flash memory is the driving force for higher speed storage connections such as PCIe and 12 Gb/s SAS. At the recent EMC World conference the company pushed flash memory for many applications in data centers. The company is offering flash memory for servers and as flash appliances and all flash memory storage arrays. Flash memory as a cache for HDD arrays is a popular application in enterprise environments.

EMC’s Thunder offered custom PCIe SSD cards for an acceleration appliance. The product offers hot swap-ability for the customer PCIe cards making repair and upgrade easier. The product is meant to provide acceleration to a more conventional server and will probably compete with products rom Violin Memory and Texas Memory Systems. EMC’s recent acquisition of XtremeIO and their all-flash storage system combined with in-house designed products puts EMC at the forefront of flash memory integration into enterprise environments.

Established companies such as EMC, NetApp, Oracle and HDS are adding flash memory to their storage systems. Beyond these current storage products by established storage companies there is a wave of start-up companies working to enhance flash memory performance, increase its endurance and lower its costs. These company’s will bring on the next wave of flash storage innovation to the enterprise storage industry.

Al Gore recently invested $12 M into GreenBytes in order to help them introduce a three level cell (TLC) flash memory storage array. The Solidarity array has three tiers of flash memory storage. The top layer is a 48 GB cache for organizing the writing of data for better utilization of the flash memory in the other layers. The middle layer consists of two STEC ZeusRAM drives and two STEC MLC drives and is used for metadata and intermediate data storage.

The third layer uses TLC memory for capacity storage at a much lower price per bit. Even though the TLC cells have an erase-write rating of only 5,000 cycles the company says the system provides an acceptable life using wear-leveling, write reduction and overprovisioning. (although we would like to see some field data on this) and provide a total storage capacity of up to 2 TB. In addition, the Solidarity array carries out compression and in-line deduplication (a common theme in the new generation of flash memory storage). The company claims a 92% data reduction and projects that the cost/GB of flash memory for enterprise applications will be less than $2/GB in about a year.

Nutanix offers a PCIe-based storage system that provides an enormously scalable cluster storage utilizing virtual machines to create a storage nodes that don’t share memory or storage and act as independent server/storage entities. This system is said to scale better than Isilon and 3PAR and even the EMC XTremio. Nutanix is currently using Fusion-io PCIe cards but is open to new PCIe card technologies. The basic unit is a 2U box with four Nutanix nodes iside it. Additional nodes can be added. Each node has 2-8 Xeon 5650 processors providing 6-48 coes and up to 768 GB of RAM, 1.3 TB of Fusion-io ioDrive PCIe flash cards and a mid-layer of up to 1.2 TB of Intel SSD storage.

Skyera is also offering compression and deduplication to lower the total cost to storage content on a flash memory based enterprise storage system. They project that within a year they may be able to bring the storage system costs of flash memory storage to less than $1/GB using consumer MLC flash memory technology. The company will accomplish this with advanced flash management algorithms using RAID 5 technology and a proprietary flash memory controller while providing acceptable flash endurance. The company plans to announce products based upon this architecture later in 2012.

Flash memory is now established in enterprise environments. It is a major driver of faster communication channels and quicker system responses. The use of flash memory enables social networking companies such as Facebook to retain acceptable response to traffic-heavy social networking and is behind a great many new cloud based services. This technology is creating new demand for enterprise storage and for the creation and distribution of digital content in general. The demand for these products and their implementation will increase with lower storage costs and that is a key driver of the new storage start-ups working on enterprise storage products.